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Comment by grepular | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think that projects to overlay a darknet on our existing Internet infrastructure are several orders of magnitude more likely to succeed.

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Overlaying on existing infrastructure is a faster way to get up and running, but ultimately a darknet that depends on another network is vulnerable to that network's centralized 'off' button.

Perhaps the best design would allow both. A darknet which seemlessly routes over independent mesh networks and the Internet. Ultimately, the Internet is going to have to play a part in such a network. How else is data going to travel between cities and across oceans?

Between cities? In the cars of people who bring their laptop with them home from work.

Across oceans? Never underestimate the speed of a ten foot container filled with 2 terabyte harddrive :)

Never underestimate the speed of a ten foot container filled with 2 terabyte harddrive

No. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with harddrives. Always underestimate the speed of said truck.

Networking is easy when latency doesn't matter. Unfortunately, it does.

Latency matters sometimes. I'm an old-fashioned guy who still subscribes to a lot of blogs, and for that, a few days of latency is irrelevant to me.

This darknet wont be supporting IM then? ;)

See, that's what I didn't get about the article: DARPA intended the Internet to be built against single points of failure.

Where is the Internet's 'off button'? Sure, there are exchanges and backbones that are more important than others (e.g. LINX in London), but it takes sustained and continuous efforts by a government to even come close to filtering/censoring the Internet effectively.

What people generally say is that the net was designed to be robust against things like a nuclear strike taking out some part of the network.

That is very different from saying that it can't be turned off, by a government with the power to legally compel infrastructure operators to do things.

I'd say that the US government, if it wanted to, could turn off the Internet, for most of its citizens, over the course of a few days.

What would stop this happening is the legal framework, and the business and societal infrastructure that depends on the Internet functioning; but not some technological property of the Internet.

The ability to knock domains out, at the DNS level, was demonstrated not too long ago - e.g. http://torrentfreak.com/feds-seize-pokerstars-full-tilt-poke...

Theres this meme out there that the Internet cant be turned off, because its designed in a 'decentralised' manner, and its just not true, in pragmatic terms.

Forget the power of the courts, the US government outright owns some significant pieces of the internet infrastructure.

Which ones? Aside from a few DNS servers and some nice to have services (time.nist.gov or whatever), I can't think of any offhand.

it takes sustained and continuous efforts by a government to even come close to filtering/censoring the Internet effectively

Yes, and they (government) are the sort of people who sometimes want to censor speech & the internet. Some countries have filtered the internet before, this is not an abstract problem.

This is true. I think it's the only practical approach given current technology though.

When somebody comes up with a £50 home wifi access point that has a range of a mile or more inside an urban environment, that is when we'll get a proper darknet.

There are wimax routers that already make it possible, but the vast majority of people want simple wifi. It does the job and most importantly it's what the ISP installs for them.

There is not a good evolutionarily stable strategy that leads to 1-mile-range wifi becoming standard. At least not now and not any time soon.

I'd love to have a wimax router, but aren't they expensive? And require a license to operate?

Why would you need a mile in an urban environment? Trace out a circle with that radius in Google Earth; it's an absurd range.

The idea is that you have a pretty high density of users. 100 meters would be more than enough to cross any street and reach several buildings away in any direction. Even in an American suburb, it'd reach a few houses away. That's a realistic goal: 100 meters, not 1600.

Because none of my neighbours will have the hardware. And if they don't have it, I'm not getting it because it's a waste of my time.

If you expand the number of neighbours to all of those that are within a mile of me, you increase the likelyhood of finding somebody by a large amount. I would buy kit just because I'd be interested in finding these people.

Chicken/Egg etc

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think that part of what makes the longer range nice is that it requires fewer hops and thus lower latency.

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